Column067 — July/August 2004
Another ME Column
Volume 36, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2004
Ampersand Squared
Edited by Geop Huth. 2004; 92 pp; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press, 1708 Hayworth Road,
Port Charlotte FL 33952. $10 ppd.
Sack Drone Gothic.
By Al Ackerman. 2003; 14 pp; Pa;
Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Avenue,
Columbus OH 43214. $6 ppd.
I tripped again as the year began, mailing in my Small Press Review column for January/February late. Then, I got ridiculously confused, getting it into my head that the late column, or the one I sent right after it, had been lost in the mail. Complicating matters was my having accidentally deleted my only copies of both the columns involved. Before finding out neither of my columns had been lost, I made new columns that repeated material in the previous ones, and had to withdraw them. But I still need to comment on some of the items I mentioned in the unlost columns, because I said so little about them there (and probably indicated I’d say more in the future). I can’t yet because I still have no copy of my second unlost column, so can’t be sure of not repeating myself. This column will thus be a side-column, consisting of three announcements about ME.
First, though, I do want to quote and briefly comment on part of Al Ackerman’s 20-stanza Heroic Hack of various John M. Bennett poems, shared and solo, Sack Drone Gothic, which I covered in at least one of my previous columns. It’s the first line of Stanza 13 of that work, which I’m fairly certain I haven’t yet quoted: “MORE DONG (this the happy jute part).” As ever: a strange combination of the very funny with exits into a kind of lyrical Zen–for those who go clicky-hey over locutions like “drawers and side and ledge” (which is part of the quotation from stanza 18 of Ackerman’s poem, which I did mention in one of the two preceding columns).
Now for the announcements about ME. One is that my outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press just published Ampersand Squared, a collection of pwoermds, which that term’s inventor, anthology editor Geof Huth, incorrectly defines as a one-word poem without a title, believing that a title is part of a poem. There are many fetching pwoermds in his gathering, some of the very best by Huth, himself. Aram Saroyon’s famous “lighght” and famous “eyeye” are here plus specimens from both mainstream and otherstream poets like Emily Romano, Cor van den Heuvel, Jonathan Brannen and Richard Kostelanetz (with a four-page pwoermd!) Needless to say, I have two in it, as well. The book has an excellent introduction by Huth–and a rippingly thorough bibliography that the hypermeticulous Huth fashioned, with some help from me (I pointed out a book I wrote that wasn’t in it but should have been). The asking price for Ampersand Squared is $10 but if you order from me and mention this column, you can have it ppd. for $6. (Note: as of April Fools’ Day 2005 no one has taken me up on this; not that I ever thought this column influential, here–where the offer also applies–or at Small PRess Review. Still . . .)
Incidentally, I had the anthology done by a publish-on-demand firm called Bookmobile, which mIEKAL aND told me about. I highly recommend them. They did an excellent job (from print-ready computer files) for a reasonable price: $630 for printing and shipping 200 copies. And I can now order 25 additional copies from them at any time for less than $3 a copy. The price, I gather, would have been about the same if the book have been eight-and-a-half inches by five-and-a-half inches, instead of the non- standard four-and-a-quarter inches by five-and-a-half inches Ampersand Squared is, for those interested in publishing something of a more standard size than the latter.
Another ME announcement is that Mary Veazey recently very attractively published a collection of 11 of my solitextual (textual only) poems about a persona named “Poem” at her Sticks website. It’s at http://www.stickspress.com/grummanc.html#target.
My last announcement about myself is about my new blog, which can be found at http://www.reocities.com/Comprepoetica/Blog/Bloghome.html. I’ve now made daily posts to it for over 100 days. Since making my previous announcement about it, I’ve added two galleries and an essay section. One of the galleries holds the twelve finished mathemaku I’ve made to date since starting the site. The other is devoted to a sequence of mine, “Long Division of Poetry,” in which I divide various words or phrases such as “words” and “numbers” and “beauty” into “poetry”; the answer is always the same distorted, upside-down version of “words,” the product of it and the divisor always a graphic that’s a full-color variation of an old visual poem of mine called, “Summer Things.” I consider it my most important poem so far.
I highly recommend having a blog. Mine is part of my website, Comprepoetica, which costs me $5 a month at Geocities (but would be free if I didn’t need extra space for my graphic images). It has the value of a diary, which is (mainly) to force one to write something daily, with the advantage that it’s public, which forces one to try to write something with some potential interest to others.
One of these days I’ll do a column on Blogs. There are some excellent ones out there including Geof Huth’s Visualizing Poetics at http://www.dbqp.blogspot.com (this one inspired me to start mine and at times carries on discussions with the latter) and Crag Hill’s Poetry Scorecard at http://scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score. One that is particularly good in covering burstnorm territories I’m not as up on as I feel I ought to be is language poet Ron Silliman’s Silliman’s Blog at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/. To balance things out a bit, let me also direct you to Mike Snider’s Formal Blog and Sonnetarium at http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501. He is worth reading although he actually admires the tripe published in Poetry.